they’ve released some code to embed a very simple Javascript based MP3 player on any website.

The player finds MP3s on a given web page, creates a playlist and a very simple overlay to play the songs. A small play icon is placed next to every MP3 link, and the player itself hovers over the bottom left of the page. It can be expanded to show a playlist of all files on the page (Yahoo is using the XSPF format).

This is clearly just a first step in whatever they’re doing over the long term. There are hints at monetization strategies – file names are linked to Yahoo search, for example.

The Flash player that we recently released on next.yahoo.net is a sibling. It has many of the same roots, code, and features and it is maintained by the same team. Although they don’t look the same, in a way they are different skins over a single underlying product. Sometimes you need Flash and sometimes you need Javascript, but either way you’re playing the page.

The documentation and community home for the project is a public wiki at Wikia. Why use a wiki for documentation? Because documentation and community are two sides of the same coin, and wikis integrate them. Why go outside of Yahoo for such an important part of our project? The goal is to make the developer community healthier by making it truly independent.

The API is fairly rich. You can set the image we use for album art. You can control the playlist sequence. You can tell us the song title. You can operate in strict mode or quirks mode. To learn more, see How To Link on the wiki.

We’re creating a new generation of playlist technology by turning the page into a playlist. Our player knits all the songs in the page together so that they play one after the other. The result is continuous play within the hosting web page.

This is different from a badge in that we don’t provide the content. It doesn’t make sense for these to always be tied together.

It’s different from a normal library in that users don’t need to install their own copy. This makes it easier for users to adopt, and it allows us to do ongoing maintenance at web speed.

If you fool around with the player you’ll find that you can click through to a Yahoo! search on the song title. This is a simple and unintrusive way to for us to monetize the traffic, and it keeps our business goals aligned with user needs because the search has to be adding value if we want people to use it.

Our design principle is: we eat the complexity so that you don’t have to. There’s no reason for a user to have to think about syntax for embedding an object. Plain vanilla links to media are all you should need. So I’d say to TechCrunch that we’re up to something small and simple.